Last month, when releasing a report showing that 100,000
children went hungry in Britain in 2014 because their parents’ benefits
were stopped or cut, Niall Cooper, chief executive of pressure group Church
Action on Poverty, made a simple yet devastating analogy.
“If you commit a crime, no court is allowed to make you go
hungry as a punishment. But if you’re late for an appointment at the Job Centre
they can remove all your income and leave you unable to feed you or your family
for weeks,” he said.
In fact, there is evidence of people stealing in order to be
sent to prison and guaranteed
three meals a day.
This is the most urgent justification of a basic income.
More than 900,000
people in Britain used the food banks of just one provider, the Trussell
Trust, in 2013-14 and the most common reasons were benefit sanctions or benefit
delays. Always cruel, many of the reasons are arbitrary
and absurd. So there is a critical need, you could even call it a demand,
for an unconditional income floor –
an income that cannot be whisked away at a moment’s notice, at the whim of a
bureaucrat with a target to meet. Everyone has their basic subsistence covered.
Period.
That seems to be the rationale behind the UK Green Party’s
“long term aspiration” for a basic income of £3,700 a year. And while the
Greens are mulling it over, 19 well-known economists, including Guy Standing,
have called on the European Central Bank to introduce an unconditional income
of €175
a month (€2,100 a year), as an alternative to alleged economic stimulus of
quantitative easing. Similarly, the Spanish anti-austerity party, Podemos,
wants an unconditional income for the unemployed, though like the UK Greens, Podemos
is committed, in principle, to a basic income.
Obviously, no-one can live on €2,100 a year, or £3,700 for
that matter. These are policies for unconditional income support, rather than a
liveable basic income. But they are edging their way towards a minimum income
for everyone. For argument’s sake, let’s put the level at £7,000 pa. As one
American supporter of basic
income writes. “Without an
income floor set at the poverty level as
a bare minimum, I believe poverty and inequality will continue to grow, the
middle classes will continue to shrink, and the livelihoods of all but the top
fifth of society will continue to slip away.”
This is one
kind of basic income. An income floor for the increasingly numerous precariat.
13.5 million people in Britain live on incomes at or below 60% of the median,
which is about £21,000.
But there is
another kind of basic income and it has far more ambitious horizons. The Swiss
Generation Basic Income group who will spearhead a referendum campaign for the
introduction of a basic income in Switzerland in 2016, want it to be much more
than a subsistence fall-back. They are calling for it to be set at 2,500 Swiss
francs a month, the equivalent of £20,000 or US$ 30,000. Another advocate of an
unconditional income, the Australian trade union organiser, Godfrey Moase, sets
the bar at AUD$30,000 (about £15,000). A universal basic income is not just for the
precariat, says Generation Basic Income’s Enno Schmidt, it is for everyone. It
is not a product of class struggle, he insists, it does not exclude the rich.
Each kind of
basic income obviates the problems thrown up by the other kind, though in turn
generates new issues.
To take the
first sort of income floor basic income. Though few can doubt its necessity,
the intrinsic problem with this kind of unconditional income it that it is only
relevant for the bottom 30 or 40% of society – people who can’t get enough
hours to support themselves or their dependants, the working poor or unemployed,
adults in education or simply those who would gladly trade a stressful job for
substantially less money but the freedom to choose the life they want.
The dilemma
this variant of basic income provokes is that you can easily imagine it
inculcating a reverse politics of envy. The excluded two-thirds or 60% of
society will feel they are financially carrying the lucky minority who have the
freedom not to work, or work less, and devote themselves to freely chosen
pursuits. Astonishingly, this inverted politics of envy is already being avidly
stoked in Britain by the Conservatives and their ‘strivers v shirkers’
rhetoric. A basic income would probably elevate this sentiment to astronomical
proportions. Once introduced, it is conceivable that a basic income would engender
an exodus of people from the world of work to the Saturday morning world of
unconditional income. But that would still leave a resentful 50% with the
perception of an even greater burden and the pressure from the other side to
raise the basic income. Although you can foresee a new social dispensation
taking shape, there would be immense social strife in the meantime.
The other,
more ambitious, kind of basic income avoids stirring up envious feelings. Set
at a much higher level, it is overtly an unconditional income for everybody. “Basic income doesn’t exclude,” says Enno Schmidt. “It’s about humans.” It is
clear that the social problems that have prompted an interest in an
unconditional income are not restricted to the precariat. Anxiety and
depression are rampant across social classes and a sense of powerlessness and
control by outside forces affects people with full-time, well paid jobs as much
as those on the fringes. “Who, experiencing for years the daily toll of intense
corporate pressure, could truly escape severe anxiety?” wrote Alan Lightman in
his 2001 novel, The Diagnosis.
Beyond the
issue of how to pay for this kind of unconditional income (which I will come to
in part 3), two questions arise. One is why pay a basic income to rich people,
or people with moderate but secure incomes for that matter, and secondly, what
exactly would they do with it if they received such an income? The frequent
justification for a basic income that it represents a new attitude to work and
would act as a balm for feelings of stress, burn-out and anxiety. “We’re
facing a shift of the paradigm of what work means to us, and it is this
generation who is ready to express this shift”, said Marilola
Wili of Generation Basic Income in 2013.
The fact that a basic income would be paid to all adults, not households,
means that, set at a generous level, it would certainly enable those that
wished to, to swap their jobs for less demanding ones, or pack in work
altogether. But for those that didn’t choose those options, a basic income
would just mean the amassing of a lot of additional money. Maybe the possibility
of escape represented by the mere existence of a basic income, would engender a
seismic change in the culture of work. That could
be one effect, but it’s also possible that the repercussions of introducing a
basic income would be much more modest than its advocates envisage.
Pilot studies in basic income undertaken in the US and
Canada in the 1970s indicate that participants responded by only
slightly reducing their working hours.
Such findings have been used to assuage fears that, with the
introduction of a basic income, industrial civilisation would grind to a halt
and everyone would sit around, doing nothing. But another conclusion is also
possible – why go to all the trouble of introducing a basic income if the
results are so meagre?
Because in the real world society we inhabit, it is a
neo-classical fiction that, even with a basic income to fall back on, people in
employment would have the choice to reduce their working hours. They could
leave their jobs, certainly, or maybe switch to a less demanding job, or become
self-employed. Within households, one partner may leave their job while the
better-paid one stays on. But it is my hunch that many would people make the
decision to stay in their jobs, working similar hours, and so the only palpable
effect of a basic income for many would be to supply a large extra income. You
could argue this would reduce inequality but it also has the potential to be
funnelled into buying property, stoking an even bigger housing bubble than the
one we have now.
I think here we can see the limitations of what a basic
income can do. Basic income is not the same thing as Bertrand Russell's 'organised diminution of work'. It can immeasurably strengthen the hand of the individual as
they negotiate with the world of the work. That feature should not be
underestimated. But in choosing to leave what goes on in that world untouched, basic
income reveals itself as impotent in dealing with the ‘daily toll of intense
corporate pressure’. Many institutions, in pursuing targets or profits or
simply impact of some kind, are now intensely
oblivious to the welfare of the people that populate them. And, ironically,
I can sense in basic income the same reluctance to challenge the behaviour of
large institutions and the distribution of property and profits that used to be
exhibited by welfare state leftism – the very movement whose demise is giving such
momentum to the movement for a basic income. On its own, a basic income is not
enough to really change society.
In part 3, I want to look at the ways in which a basic
income might be funded, and whether that can be done in an equitable, not
acrimonious, way.
Here is the first part
And part three
Here is the first part
And part three
